[ SECRET POST #1684 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #1684 ⌋


Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 10 pages, 234 secrets from Secret Submission Post #241.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 2 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 - too big/small ], [ 0 - repeats ], [ 1 2 - posted twice ]
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom.livejournal.com]

14. http://i56.tinypic.com/nmj33a.jpg

[ladyyuna07.livejournal.com]

Me too, anon...

Really, I like 'fridged anyone' stories, but I think it's the desire for someone to feel that strongly about me that the heroes in the 'fridged woman' stories feel that make me like them. ._.

[amanda-violet.livejournal.com]

You know what? Me too. It doesn't even have to be a fridged woman--it can be a fridged parent, child, friend, sibling, whatever. In the hands of a clumsy writer it can feel really blatant and overtly sexist, and I don't care for that, but I do really enjoy it when it's done well.

Haters gonna hate.

[(Anonymous)]

I just don't like that it's become a trope because I think when the "fridged woman" plot is done right it really can be a good plot device. I also think people throw around the word "fridged" when it really does not apply.

[sarolynne.livejournal.com]

It was always a trope. Putting a name to it just helps people identify it, and calling it what it is doesn't necessarily make it bad. Tropes are not a problem. Misusing them is a problem. Some tropes are sexist, yes, but the problem is that it's a sexist trope, not that it's a trope.

It is frustrating when people throw it around when it's not true, though.

[karate0kat.livejournal.com]

I think the problem happens when said woman is treated as disposable, who's only purpose is the die so men can be sad.

People die every day, including women, sometimes in very tragic circumstances, and the people who loved them, including men, are affected by it. Having someone die and people angsting over it is not automatically a bad thing. But there's a good way and a bad way to show it. The good way has nuance, the bad way has men baaaaawing all over the place and making it all about how their pain is worse than anyone else's pain and NO ONE UNDERSTANDS THE SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE.

*ahem*

[(Anonymous)]

the bad way has men baaaaawing all over the place and making it all about how their pain is worse than anyone else's pain and NO ONE UNDERSTANDS THE SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE

See Bruce Wayne in Officer Down. Yes, Bruce, your pain over Jim Gordon being shot is far more significant than his daughter's pain!!!rage!

[cyren-2132.livejournal.com]

I think -- much like the Bechdel Test -- the Fridged Woman Trope is good for examining trends in fiction, but not much else. There's no hidden meaning behind it, it's not a sign of a work's quality, it's just a trend that some people like and some people don't.

Personally, I agree that losing a loved one is a great motivator for a particular type of story. I mean, let's face it -- we'd all like to know the person who would go off and fight for justice just because it's the right and good thing to do. But that's not nearly as fun or as satisfying a story to watch unfold as the person who is going off to avenge/in memory of a loved one.

[megalomaniageek.livejournal.com]

IAWTC.
It's not so much "this work killed a female character and now a male character is motivated by it, therefore it is sexist and terrible" as much as "man, there sure are a lot of works that choose to do it this way. Seems kinda sexist when you look at them all together."

[(Anonymous)]

Do you mean "frigid" or is there some subgenre about stuffing women in refrigerators that I've somehow overlooked?

[megalomaniageek.livejournal.com]

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WomenInRefrigerators

Like many fictional devices, the term has had a little bit of drift in meaning. But it basically refers to two major trends:
- female cast members die more than male cast members, particularly before the end, and often in very violent ways
- the death is seen as tragic because of how it affects the men around her, not because she's an autonomous person who is now gone forever

[megalomaniageek.livejournal.com]

Me too, OP. Me too.

[resounding-echo.livejournal.com]

I like "fridged characters" provided they aren't always female love interests without any personality.

[21lights.livejournal.com]

This

[philstar22.livejournal.com]

This. I wish there were more "fridged men" effecting women. The problem isn't the existence of this idea. The problem is that it is overwhelmingly women and overwhelmingly they are killed off just to effect men and that it is often done to characters who are nothing outside of being love interests.

[etazere.livejournal.com]

All I saw was women in refrigerators like R. Kelly in the closet.

[(Anonymous)]

"I know that killing off women is a cheap and unoriginal way to create strife for men!"

Not always. You're assuming that every female character who dies is a "fridged woman" when she isn't. It's okay to like that sort of plot. What people complain about is when it's used ONLY for the purpose of creating strife for men.

Taking that attitude to an extreme, if an author avoids killing off women in his/her stories and only kills men because they're afraid of being sexist, then you have a whole different problem.

Except...

[fairhearing.livejournal.com]

... in "Sleeping Beauty," the Disney movie, Aurora is (temporarily) fridged by a woman (Maleficent) for the primary character pain of three women (the fairies). Philip & co. are kind of non-entities. Isn't that interesting?

You know what else is interesting? Sleeping Beauty fails the reverse Bechdel test. There is no instance of two men having a conversation about anything other than a woman. Even when the two kings are arguing, or Philip and his father, they're talking about Aurora.

Did you know that's another reason why Sleeping Beauty poops on all your favs?

[tasogare-n-hime.livejournal.com]

I think "fridging" is another one of those things that gets swept up in generalizations. You have stories where the death of love interest/family member/friend works really well. I think one of the worst "fridge woman" incidences I've ever come across is Euris from Last Exile. There was so much to work with there, but Euris ended up being nothing but the plot device. It took a lot of the emotion out of the story for me.

[gabzillaz.livejournal.com]

Does Aurora count as fridging?

I like some of the plotlines, but it bugs me that most of them use the females as fodder to show the suffering of a male.

There aren't many stories where the woman is the one losing her whole family/husband/friend.

[sensualcoco.livejournal.com]

If the character they fridge wasn't developed in the first place, then I don't miss them. It's like I never knew them or cared about them, so I don't get upset over them.

Now, if we get to know a woman, get to see her story, and something causes her to die. It feels like a whole story for her, then I like it, but I don't think that really falls under the 'fridged trope' because it's a story about the woman.

So, yeah, in general I don't like fridged women. (and not just from a feminist point of view but from an emotional connection.)

[velvet-mace.livejournal.com]

I'm not a fan of character death, but man, give me a damsel in distress and I'm all over that. I just love the tension, the vulnerability, the non-fatal whump that they then get to come back from, the other characters who will do anything in their power to get them back. So yummy.

[childings.livejournal.com]

I am guilty of writing a fridged woman (well, in this case, girl) plotline for a character's backstory but I scrapped it mostly for the same reason (bad feminist, etc). And I kind of like them too, but I don't know why. Maybe if there were more men that got fridged I wouldn't feel so guilty about it liking it as a plot device. (Though I only like it when it's a character you barely know, and it's part of another character's backstory and therefore an event that happened before the main plot began, not when it's a character that's factored heavily into the story from the beginning)

[starphotographs.livejournal.com]

I think I like fridged-anyone plotlines, too. I know they can be seen as sort of cliche and simplistic, but I think they can be done really well.

As an aside, I think part of why they can be interesting to me is because of one of the things I've seen people complaining about: that the dead person exists only as a motivator for another character, not as an autonomous entity in their own right. I know that can be a sign of lazy writing (as in, "they're not here so I guess developing them isn't important"), but I also kind of think that unintentionally touches on something really good. Because the thing is, that character isn't an entity in their own right, not anymore. They're dead. They only exist in the other character's mind, probably in simplified form. And seeing as even very strong memories and impressions can degrade over time, especially when they're being rehashed again and again, you may end up with only a very vague idea of who that person really was. Maybe the surviving character doesn't even have as clear a picture as they might once have had. So it's this person dedicating themselves to this faded, distorted image of someone who they're never going to get back. So I guess the problem isn't that the dead character is flat, it's just that no one ever seems to go in to why they logically would be flat. Which is kind of the most interesting part to me.

/not making any damn sense

[ariseishirou.livejournal.com]

Eh, to each her own, but it's one of my least favourite tropes ever. I've stopped reading/watching/playing whole series when it appears. Women are not objects to be written off for a chance at exploring yet some more speshul snowflake manpain.

Of course it can be handled really well, but when it isn't, I give up.